XIV
THE WORLD ASPECT
The American Negroes are the aristocrats of the Negro world. It may be a paradox to assume that a proletariat can become an aristocracy, but an aristocracy is the best a race can produce in culture and manners. No doubt African Negrodom is made up of a great number of races, but all seem to have one common interest and to yield more homage to the name of Africa itself than to any constituent part, kingdom, or state or pasture. The American Negro is beginning to lead Africa as he is leading the Indies. The reason is that the children of the American slaves have made the greatest cultural progress of all Negroes. Though persecution has been less in some parts of Africa and on the West Indian islands, opportunity has also been less. In 1863 America committed herself to the task of raising her millions of black slaves to the cultural level of white citizenship. But no one has ever essayed to raise the savage masses of Africa much higher than the baptismal font. It is always pointed out to the American Negro that his good fortune is prodigious. The Negro retorts that if he has good fortune his fathers paid for it in the sufferings of slavery, and he still pays in the price of lynching. Yet, of course, the Negroes in Africa have suffered greatly, and their fathers suffered greatly. No Negro can deny that he owes America much. And Africa owes, or will owe, more still.
In America the door at least stands open for Negro progress. In Africa, and especially in South Africa, it is not quite certain that the door is not closed. If the door remains ajar it is not because the white man wills it, but because the American Negro has got his foot in. A low Commercial-Imperial idea reigns. The native is, “the labor on the spot.” An unfailing supply of cheap native labor is considered the great desideratum. Attempts on the Negro’s part to raise himself by education or by technical skill are looked upon with suspicion, and one must remember that as far as the British Empire or French or Belgian mandatorial regions are concerned there are no institutions in Africa comparable to Tuskegee and Hampton. If the labor unions in the United States are foolishly antagonistic to the progress of Negro skilled labor, they are twice more so in South Africa. If there is peonage in America there is an abundance of pseudo slavery in Africa, and while the American trolley car has its Jim Crow section the South African one often has not even that, and the Negro must walk unless accompanied by white employer. An open hostility has arisen between Black and White which much resembles that of the Southern States of America. If it were not for the leadership of the American Negroes it would not be promising for Negrodom as a whole.
Of course there is a vital difference between the British Empire and the United States; the people of the empire are subjects, and of the republic they are citizens. While Britain technically rules her four hundred million colored subjects from above downward America theoretically holds that all her people are free and equal. The American ideal is higher, the British more practical.
There is another difference, and it is that our Blacks, except in the Indies, are mostly indigenous, and have not been transplanted from their native wilds. They have not been slaves and have not the slave psychology. In Africa the white man is in contact with masses of natives in a primitive condition; in the United States the Negro has been definitely cut off from his kith and kin. The American Negro was set free in a land rampant with democratic ideals and possessed of a sublime belief in human progress. But Africa has been and is increasingly a commercial domain whose only function from the modern white man’s point of view is the making of material fortune. The white man in Africa is much more exclusively a dollar hunter than the American. And though Britain has been much praised for letting South Africa govern herself it does not seem as if the Union was mating much progress in ideals and culture. The King of England was a better friend to the native than the local government is proving itself to be.
A blatant anti-nigger tendency is growing throughout the British Empire, and it is very vulgar, very undignified, and at the same time disgraceful. It applies to India and Egypt as much as to Africa. It is due perhaps to a general deterioration in education and training. One may remark that those who complain of the ways of their servants are generally unfitted to have servants, and it is characteristic of parvenus to ill treat those beneath them, and I would say if a white man cannot get on well with a Negro it is a sign that he is not a gentleman. But the genuine type of English gentleman is passing. To think that the race of Livingstone and Stanley and Harry Johnston should be pitifully complaining about the Negroes, as if God had not made them aright!
The British people used to be able to manage native races well—in the age of the Victorian, when the Englishman could treat his native servant as if he were a gentleman also, never doubting that in God’s sight an equal dignity invested both master and man. Read the memoirs and letters of colonial people of time past, and then compare with the current noisy prejudice in India and Africa. The falling away is appalling. And the “natives” know the change which has been coming about—the new type of officer and employer, the man with the whisky brain, the mind stocked with music-hall funniosity and pseudo cynicism, the grumbler, the man who expects everything to have been arranged for his comfort and success beforehand. Astonishing to hear young officers calling even Hindoos and Syrians and Arabs niggers! The native instinctively knows the man of restraint and good manners and human dignity and properly trained unselfishness. The lowest coolie can tell the difference between a gentleman and a cad; and the educated colored man, while he respects in the deepest way the nation of Shakespeare and Burke and Wellington and Gordon, is puzzled to find a common spirit in the English-speaking people of to-day.
“I was reared in an atmosphere of admiration—almost of veneration—for England,” says Dr. Du Bois. “I had always looked on England as the best administrator of colored peoples, and laid her success to her system of justice,” but he wavers in that faith now, having heard the new story of Hindoos and Arabs and the Negroes of South Africa and Negroes of West Africa.